Opinion Floods in J&K and a warning from the hills

The impact of climate change on Western Disturbances has been noticeable for at least a decade. The low-pressure system originates in the Mediterranean Sea and typically moves eastward across Central Asia and northern India during the winter and spring seasons. However, it has begun to occur with increasing frequency lately during the summer and monsoon seasons. Its presence during the Southwest Monsoon often leads to extreme rainfall, flash floods, and landslides in the Himalaya. There have been at least 14 such disturbances in the current monsoon season. As a result, extreme rainfall events have taken a toll in parts of the Northeast, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, and Jammu and Kashmir. In the latest monsoon-related tragedy in the Himalaya, more than 40 people, most of them Vaishno Devi pilgrims, were swept away by flash floods and buried under rocks in Jammu as the region recorded its highest-ever 24-hour rainfall on Wednesday. The calamity should be a lesson for authorities to step up vigilance and prioritise safety on roads that see heavy traffic, even during peak monsoon — pilgrim routes, for example. More importantly, the Centre, state governments in the Himalayan region, and research institutions should come together to create warning mechanisms that alert people to weather vagaries.

The constant reworking of rocks in the world’s youngest mountain chain aggravates the fragility of the Himalaya, and increases the vulnerabilities of the people who live in the mountain states. Last week, the government told the Lok Sabha that J&K was among the more landslide-prone regions of the country, with 12 per cent of its “mapped hilly area falling under the highly-susceptible category”. The Minister of State (Independent Charge) for Earth Sciences, Jitendra Singh, told the House that the Geological Survey of India (GSI) has completed landslide susceptibility mapping of the Himalayan region. Much of this information is available on the GSI’s portals. It’s now up to planners, governments, and disaster management authorities to use this information in their climate adaptation programmes. Priority should be given to monitoring the most vulnerable zones with a dense population or large traffic movement — regions hit in the last two days, for example — and a large built-up area.

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It is, however, also correct that flash floods cannot be predicted with pinpoint accuracy. For instance, it’s now apparent that the disaster in Dharali in Uttarakhand, earlier this month, was not preceded by heavier-than-usual rainfall. Experts have counselled building up knowledge to take on such vagaries. Creating a council of Himalayan states, for instance, could be the first step towards a coordinated effort to gauge the stress on the region’s ecosystem, especially the pressure on the rocks, and create more detailed repositories that could help understand the rainfall thresholds of individual slopes. Such knowledge should inform the framing of building codes in the mountains. Building up people’s resilience to climate change will require constant information updating. The toll taken by the rains this year frames the challenge for policymakers and experts.